[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find Now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees, Strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz. For many years, critics of renewable solar and wind energy complained that they were not always available and that they required backup from other energy sources. For a long time, battery storage was prohibitively expensive. But the cost of batteries has now dropped below $100 a kilowatt hour. And everyone from homeowners with rooftop solar to utilities are installing banks of batteries to store solar and wind energy for use when neither are available. The old power plant site at Moss Landing included, until recently, batteries able to store 3.7 million kilowatt hours of electricity. The largest operator at the site was Vistra, with 3 million kilowatt hours of lithium ion batteries. On January 16, 2025, a fire broke out at the Vistra plant, burning for two days and scattering heavy metals and other toxic materials across the plant's surroundings, including Alcorn Slough. In February, the same batteries caught fire again. What are the batteries doing there? Why did they burn for two days? Do the plant's neighbors have reason to be concerned about their health, the effects on the slough, and the safety of locally produced food? And what are the implications of the fire for California's renewable energy plans? I have three guests today. First, Rick O'Connell, executive director of Grid Lab, who will explain what the batteries are doing at Moss Landing, how they work, why they burned, and what the fire means for renewable energy more generally. My second guest is Dr. Ivano Aiello, professor of Geological Oceanography at San Jose State's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. He'll discuss the results of his research into toxic materials deposited around the plant following the fire and potential implications for people and the environment. My third guest is Professor Megan Tealey Strong professor of Environmental Sociology at San Jose State, who will talk about the health and social impacts of the fire on people living around the site. My first guest today is Rick O'Connell, executive director of GridLab. Rick O'Connell, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: Great.
[00:02:56] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Why don't we begin by having you tell us about the role of storage batteries in today's energy systems and what they were doing at Moss Landing?
[00:03:07] Speaker D: Yeah. So California really started moving towards batteries before most of the most places in the US and we really did that because we have a lot of solar on our grid. And that solar is great. It generates a lot of power during the daytime. But what it means is it doesn't really generate during the night when sun goes down. And so when we need power at night, batteries really help us shift that solar from the middle of the day to sort of our new peak time, which is now kind of between 4 and 9pm so the batteries that were at Moss Landing were essentially doing that on a daily basis. They would charge up in the middle of the day when we had all this extra solar power on the grid, and then they would discharge in the evening, providing power. So people, when they went home, they could turn on their TVs, cook dinner, run their fridges, run air conditioning, all.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: That stuff about how much power were the batteries storing? How much energy? Batteries store energy, right?
[00:04:03] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, great question. Yeah. So normally these batteries are what we call four hour batteries. Right. So they're power to energy. So if they're, you know, 100 megawatts of power, they would have 400 megawatt hours of gener of energy. And the specific question about the Vistra batteries, Moss Landing, one of the largest installations, I believe was around 700 megawatt hours. But I don't actually have that figure off the top of my head.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: That's okay. I think I, I, I actually looked it up and I think the total battery capacity at, at Moss Land, 3600 megawatt hours. Is that right? I always get the zeros wrong. And of that, and of that Vistra I think was, was something like 3,000 megawatt hours, the biggest one.
[00:04:52] Speaker D: Yeah, that sounds right.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: So who is Vistra or what is Vistra and I mean, who owned the batteries?
[00:04:58] Speaker D: Yeah, so Vistra owned the batteries. Vistra is what we call an independent power producer, or an ipp. They're essentially a utility that owns generation, but they don't own customers. Like PG and E is a utility that, you know, has customers. You know, Vistra really is just a, they're just a power producer. Right. So they have power plants all over the U.S. they're headquartered in Texas and you know, they, they provide generating capacity. They owned the Moss Landing power plant, which used to be owned by PG and E, but when California restructured, it got sold off. Right. So PG&E in Southern California Edison were asked to sell all their generating assets to these new entities, these independent power producers.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Right. And since these are storage batteries where was Vistra getting the electricity from? Were they buying it from PG&E? Were they importing it from solar farms far away?
[00:05:57] Speaker D: They were actually just, they could buy it from the market directly. So we have, you know, the California Independent System Operator or kaiso, runs a day ahead energy market in, in the, in the state of California. And you can simply, it's pretty easy to actually buy energy on the market. Prices are pretty low. So Vistra could simply just buy energy on the market and then sell it back into that same market later that later in the day.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: So basically they would buy cheap, the wholesale price is low, and then sell deer when the, when the price goes up in the evening.
[00:06:30] Speaker D: Exactly. The old, the old buy low, sell high.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds like a great deal. So why do the batteries catch fire and burn for two days?
[00:06:38] Speaker D: Well, we don't exactly know, right? So we don't have the, you know, post incident report.
But you know, you think of anytime you have a bunch of dense energy around, right? So you have a, a big tank full of gasoline, you have batteries, right? They have a lot. There's a lot of density, a lot of energy. There's a possibility of fire. But, you know, we call something, it's called thermal runaway in the batter lingo, you know. So two things happened, right? So we had thermal runaway and then we had a failure of the fire suppression system. So all these battery systems have a fire suppression system, which is if there is a fire, we want to put it out right away before it spreads and gets larger. And what happened here at Moss Landing is we had a fire and it wasn't put out and it did get larger and it ended up burning the whole facility.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: These are lithium ion batteries, correct?
[00:07:29] Speaker D: That's correct.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: And we've been warned, you know, here and there that to beware of lithium ion batteries because sometimes they have a propensity to catch fire.
Is that what was going on here? You know, we don't know exactly what happened. I've also read that the battery density, you know that in this, the hall where the batteries were, were placed, they were fairly close together. Tell us a little bit more about the, the lithium lithium ion issue.
[00:07:57] Speaker D: So the first thing that's important to know is lithium ion is kind of like an umbrella term, right? So it talks underneath. Lithium ion. You have lots of kind of, you know, it's like saying big cats, right? And you've got lions, you've got tigers, you've got, right? So there's, you know, lithium ion is an umbrella term. And these particular batteries Were. Were nmc. So it's like nickel metal, cobalt. And so the specific chemistry here is important, we believe. So these batteries were manufactured by lg, which is a Korean company. We think these are the same batteries that were in the bolt recall. The Chevy bolt, for those who remember, you know, the Chevy bolt had a better recall. And, you know, so there are other types of chemistries. Right. So the industry is actually, especially for stationary storage, is moving to lithium ion phosphate, or otherwise known as lfp, is a little bit more of a stable chemistry. So I think that's important. You know, the chemistry is. Is important. But really, I think the most important thing is what you sort of alluded to earlier was really that most of the battery installations that we see now, the batteries are containerized. So they're literally put in a shipping container. And then there's, you know, you go to a battery site, and there'll be a bunch of shipping containers, you know, each kind of like 10ft apart or, you know, some spacing apart. And so if there is an issue, like a thermal Runway, an issue, and then the fire suppression system fails. Like, at worst, you kind of, you know, you have a fire on one container. Whereas these. This facility had a whole bunch of these cells in a big. In the old turbine hall of the. Of the generating station. So it was just in this big building, and they didn't have firebreaks in between the racks. And so I think this was a real. Just the way it was a really unique installation.
It's really not like most of the other battery storage installations we see around the country. And I think that really led to the sort of the catastrophic nature of this fire, as opposed to it being only half affecting a small portion. It ended up burning the whole facility.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: The batteries were installed, what, about a couple of years ago? Right. I think. Right. And so the technology is changing so fast that this is actually an older generation of batteries at this point is my understanding, again, that if they had to do it again, they probably wouldn't put this particular type of battery in there. Is that. Is that a correct assumption?
[00:10:28] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, these were installed. These were first connected to the grid in December of 2020. So they were installed in 2020. And that seems like, well, depending on Covid. Right. It could. Sounds like a long time ago. Sounds like a short time ago. But in the battery world, that's like a. That's a long time ago right there. You know, that's. And since then, we've asked new. You know, there's been new standards. We've got new, like you said, there's newer chemistries, there's newer installation techniques. So these, this was a very early, you know, one of what, you know, one of the early facilities.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: There are a lot of people that describe the fire as a more or less catastrophic event. I mean, I kind of think of it like the early days of steam boilers when, you know, they would blow up and you'd learn something from that and then they wouldn't blow up for the same reason later on. What are the implications of this fire for renewable energy and the electric industry more generally?
[00:11:27] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a great question, and I think I'm very interested in the answer to that. I think it's a little too soon to tell, but my hope is that we learn from this that, like you said, with steam boilers, or that we, you know, figure. Figure out what's, what went wrong and we don't repeat this problem. And I think we've already mostly learned these lessons even before this fire happened. And we don't do things the way that this plant was designed anymore. But my concern is that communities around the country who are going to be asked, you know, a developer is going to come in and say, hey, we want to put in a battery storage facility. And they're going to look. And they say, well, gosh, there was this awful fire in Moss Landing. How can you be sure that that doesn't happen to my community? I have nothing but empathy for communities around the country who are asking that question. I mean, I think we already saw that in Morro Bay, where Vistra was trying to install a similar facility, you know, just down the coast from Moss Landing. So, you know, I really hope that people sort of say, hey, this is young industry. This is actually a pretty rare event. This was a pretty unique plant. This isn't going to, you know, this. There's been lots of battery installations since then that have been perfectly safe, but I think it's definitely a black eye for the industry and hopefully the industry is able to recover and sort of regain people's trust.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, well, around the plant in Santa Cruz and Monterey county, people are already organizing to oppose any additional installations there. I don't know about the rebuilding of the vistra of the Vista plant. And it does seem, it does seem like it will become more difficult. And of course, it wasn't the first fire there at Moss Landing. It was the third or fourth, I think. And then. Correct. And then I, I learned that there was a, a flare up a couple of weeks ago from the same battery Installation.
So it'll be interesting to see what, what happens. Is there anything else that you'd like to add that we haven't talked about?
[00:13:29] Speaker D: Yeah, I just think to your last point, I think it's really important to note that even that the communities around here are obviously understandably and rightfully upset. But by sort of not pushing back on installing new renewable energy and storage infrastructure, really what that does is just supports the status quo. Right. So that just means that what we already have operating, you know, the, the primarily fossil fuel system that we have today is just going to continue to operate. And you know, it's always hard. Like change is hard, installing new things are hard. You know, I think this, I think this incident is really unfortunate and it could have, it was totally preventable and it shouldn't have happened. You know, hopefully people can sort of realize that and we can move forward and be able to, you know, because we need, we really need batteries to sort of decarbonize our power system. You know, we're seeing, you know, California has now 10,000 megawatts of four hour batteries installed on its grid and probably another 2,000 installed people's homes and businesses. That's a lot of batteries and they really provide incredible value, great resilience. They bring, you know, bring down prices. It's a, you know, it's kind of a win for consumers in the environment. But you know, I think we have to get, you know, we have to make sure that we can do it safely.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean this is a, this is a sort of risk problem, right? Risk perception problem. People are very, are comfortable with having the batteries around their house because they can see them, you know, and see how they're working. You put them all in this black box somewhere, you know, and, and everyone becomes a little bit nervous. Nervous about it. Yeah, I agree with you that, that trust, rebuilding trust in this case will be really important and it'll be, as I said, interesting to see how it, how it all plays out.
[00:15:32] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean I think a really good analogy would be sort of, you know, when electric vehicles first came out and there was a lot of, you know, there was a few fires, right, where, when there were crashes and people were very nervous and they were sort of like, oh, electrical vehicles have fires. But of course we think we take a step back and we think about the status quo as we all drive around in these gasoline powered cars that have gas tanks in them and they catch on fire a lot. And I think you saw the sort of, the public perception of that risk really Kind of came down and people sort of realized, well, okay, sure, EVs catch fire every once in a while. It happens rarely, but gosh, you know, gasoline cars catch fire too. So like. And so hopefully people are going to sort of figure that out around grid scale batteries as well.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Eric O'Connell, I want to thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:16:22] Speaker D: It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for the insightful questions.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: My second guest is Dr. Ivano Aiello, professor of Geological Oceanography at San Jose State's Moss landing marine laboratories.
Dr. Ivano Aiello, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: Good morning. Good morning, Ronnie, Before I start asking.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: You questions, maybe you can tell us something about your work at the Moss Landing.
[00:16:46] Speaker C: Yeah, so, yeah, Moss Landing Marine Labs is part of the California State University system. It's a research and educational facility with a master's in marine science. And we are also part of San Jose State University as our administrative campus.
And yeah, it's a multidisciplinary program in marine science. We have people like me, geologists, chemists, biologists. And so we, we combine teaching and research at, you know, at the gradual level. Yeah.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:19] Speaker C: And we have facilities like boats and diving. So we do a lot of field work.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: So here's a question. There's more in a lithium ion battery than just lithium. What's the chemical composition of such a battery? And what do the other metals do, especially the heavy metals?
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Yeah. So having said that, I'm not a battery expert, although I guess I'm becoming one.
But so the lithium ion battery, they come in different flavors. Some of them use heavy metal as part of the cathode material. So the principle of a rechargeable lithium ion battery is that you're shuffling electrons around and in a way that when you're discharging it, the lithium, which is a very light element, releases an electrons. And the lithium, which is ionized, becomes a positive ion, migrates towards the cathode side of the battery where the heavy metals are. And, and, and the heavy metals, which include cobalt, nickel and manganese and some types of battery, especially cobalt, they get oxidized, they combine with lithium, and that's where the lithium is stored. Then once the battery is recharged, then the lithium drifts back on the anode side and the cobalt gets reduced. So it's a. That basically plays a dance between the anode and the cathode of the, of the battery size. And the cathode has the heavy metals which host the lithium as it drift.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Well, here's Another chemistry question for you. Were the heavy metals linked to the battery fire or was it the lithium? My understanding is that lithium can be fairly explosive. Is if exposed to air.
[00:19:15] Speaker C: I do not know. I don't know the causes of the battery fire, so I really can't speculate on that. I, I know that. So when you, when you get on an airplane, they ask you whether you have any lithium battery in your mind. Right. Because they are known to, you know, to catch on fire. There's a.
And I think there are different reasons why that can happen. One of them is that there's a kind of a membrane between the cathode and the anode, so that my. Actually which separates the two poles. So when that separation is not effective, then you can have sort of like kind of a short circuit. So, but, but specifically about the Vista battery fire, I have no information as to what caused it because I don't think it's been released yet. Or maybe they don't know. So I, I do not know.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Okay. Well, you and your colleagues went out into Elkhorn Slough to measure contamination of the area after the fire. What work had you been do. Had you done in the slough before the fire happened, and what had you found in the soil there?
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Yeah, so the, the, the discovery of this heavy metal particles after the fire was a serendipity kind of thing because I was working there. We were working there for years with a very different purpose than looking for battery material, which is for a very large marsh restoration project. So what we're doing, we're restoring wetlands that once were healthy and full of marsh plants and hosting different ecosystem. Then eventually they died because of human interventions such as diking, mostly diking, which essentially starved those wetlands from sedimentation. So they start sinking, and so they were underwater and marsh plants couldn't grow back. So what we have been doing, we've been adding sediments on top to restore those marsh habitats. And so that was our work. And my job was to monitor soil composition and understand what makes a marsh ecosystem healthy from that point of view. So I wasn't looking for specific for heavy metal. I was measuring a series of elements in the soils, including heavy metals. So I had this baseline information for four years. And then after the fire, I went back to my study sites, which happened to be next to the power plant, and that's when I discovered that there were higher concentration of heavy metals than before.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: And at what levels. I mean, maybe you can give our listeners an idea about what we're talking about.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: So before, in the baseline, in the sediments in the soils before the fire, the heavy metals specifically?
Well, there's also different types of heavy metals specifically. We're talking about nickel and cobalt. Those are the two main ones. There's also manganese, which is more common. But the two, nickel and cobalt, they were in the order of either being completely absent, so zero, or trace amounts to maybe 50 parts per million, maybe in some places 100 parts per million. Because, you know, it wasn't a pristine soil after the fire. Those concentration in some places went up to thousands, was two orders of magnitude increasing the concentrations. So it was very, you know, it's very obvious.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: And what would be the effects of the heavy metals on the marsh and the plants?
[00:22:53] Speaker C: That's the question. Right. And that's what we are set out to study because they're, you know, both cobalt and nickel are known to be potentially toxic to both aquatic and terrestrial species in necessary environments. So the way they got to the soil obviously was airborne. So, you know, there was a fire, a plume. Yeah, plume. And they settled out from the plume and they settle as metals. Like in those are cathode material kind of form. Eventually they must start interacting with the environment. Specifically, they must start leaching out metals which might actually enter the food web. That's exactly what we are looking for. And eventually they might bioaccumulate. And some of those metals are known to be toxic to aquatic and terrestrial species. So what we're doing now is to trace those metals as they move through the different environments. So maybe in a few months from now and maybe a year, I can give you an update as to what we find as if. And they move and what they do to the ecosystems.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know if you'd be able to answer this question, but did the heavy metals. Did the plume containing the heavy metals extend very far beyond the slough? I mean, I imagine they fall out pretty quickly out of the cloud.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: But, yeah, those are all really good questions. So I can speak for what I know because I measured it. And one thing that we saw is actually the fallout zone wasn't. So the bullseye in terms of fallout zone wasn't centered out the parent plate, but was actually some distance from it because, you know, you can imagine you have kind of a mushroom kind of structure. So the, you know, so the place of the. The concentrations are actually higher as you move away from the power plant within, you know, one to three miles, kind of a distance from the power plant. There have been other reports that show that there might be A higher heavy metal concentration actually much further away from the power plant. But that's not my data. So I, you know, something that, you know, I can't control directly, but I can tell you that our highest concentrate, the concentration don't get higher as you go towards the power plant. Actually there's a, a sweet spot which is about, I know, kilometers better. It's about, you know, 1.5, 1 km to 3 km away from the power plane.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: So.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: And, and you can see them, by the way. So the other thing is that when, when I went, went in the field right after the fire, they were burned pieces all over the place. I mean, it wasn't like an exoteric substance. So they were. So that's why I started measuring because it was obvious there was stuff all over the place. And those burnt pieces turn out to be incredibly concentrated in heavy metals. So there are like chunks of batteries, essentially.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, do you know anything about the, the impacts of, of ingestion of heavy metals on, on the human body? Or am I asking you another question that I should go.
[00:26:03] Speaker C: I know what it comes. If you, if you buy, if you, if you look online and you buy some of this battery material, anyone can make a battery, you can online and you read about the hazard, this, you know the hazards. And definitely ingestion is not recommended or recommended or also can't, you know, direct contact, so they need to be treated that has a hazardous material. That's actually something that anyone can look up. And yeah, you know, of course, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a toxicologist, so I, you know, I'm a soil scientist.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: So what are your plans to continue monitoring, especially, you know, in terms of the various other effects like rain and tides?
[00:26:48] Speaker C: Yeah, we're already doing a lot of work really trying to address this. This question is to, as to whether the, this layer of a heavy metal. And when I say a layer, you know, you should think, you should imagine that you did have larger pieces as I described earlier. But much of the heavy metals occ in a very thin dust deposit because that's what they fall out. So, and so when you measure, you have to know what you're measuring because if you skip the very surface, especially after the fire, you might see nothing because this is like a dust deposit. What we're doing, we are measuring in a direct, on a regular basis, really very high frequency, certain location where we have permanent markers. So we're going back over time and we see, and we see clearly the effects of rain. We saw concentration dropping dramatically after the major rain event in February. And we also see places where tides are coming in being also a place where some of the heavy metals seemingly have been removed by the water. They don't disappear, though, they just move. Right. So it's a. It's a mass balance. I mean, if they go away from one place, they go somewhere else.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: And there might be evidence that some of. Some of those metals are actually moving through the soil.
As, you know, as the water percolates through the soil, they might follow the water. And finally, there are also evidence that in some other places they actually are increasing in concentration because, as I said, they get shuffled around, especially when you have, like, salt pans, places where there's not much drainage that's. You see higher concentration. So this is to say that our monitoring has been very intense in the last few months. I'm constantly out in the field collecting samples or measuring right. From the field, and we are getting pretty good understanding. Phase two is to understand whether those metals are interacting with the environment, which is the big question, whether, as I mentioned earlier, they're changing form so they're becoming more bioavailable. And so I have a wonderful team of colleagues who are looking at very different aspects of the issue. They're looking at trace metals in water, in marine invertebrates, in mammals, birds. So we're looking at the whole thing. Right. Over time to see whether we see any evidence of that transfer.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: Have you published any of your results yet?
[00:29:20] Speaker C: So what day is today? So it's been not even two months since the fire. Yeah, and I am working on a publication, which it's exactly my goal because, you know, the way it works for us is that until things get peer reviewed and colleagues take our data apart and find any possible flaw.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:39] Speaker C: That's where they become, you know, accepted by the community. So I am working. We are working on a paper and.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah, last question. Do you know whether anybody else is. Is, you know, looking for traces of heavy metals, you know, within the sort of the area that the plume covered? Or are you. Is your team basically the only one that's doing this research?
[00:30:04] Speaker C: It's a good question. I. Other scientists, you mean?
[00:30:08] Speaker B: Well, or public agencies.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: No, I really don't. I know I had many people contacting me from the public, you know, because people were concerned and, you know, there's as much I can do.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: No, sure.
[00:30:21] Speaker C: And, but. And there are colleagues from other universities, but I don't know whether other government agencies, for instance, are doing any work.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: So the upshot is we don't really know well know well the footprint of the, of the plume.
[00:30:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, we, we, we don't. We, we do have this data set from this science citizen science group is I think NAM never again mos landing n a ML who published this ghost wipe results. I don't know if you saw those data which cover a much larger area. They go all the way to Santa Cruz which show that potentially the fallout was further beyond the area that I'm studying. Again, I'm looking at a very small, relatively small area.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:31:15] Speaker C: And you know, I doubt that the highest, the high concentration that I found and at the edge of my study area because it would be very unlikely that, you know, I mean my, my study area is delimited by the, you know, the, the, the scientific question that we were asking earlier on about wetland restoration. So but that doesn't mean that, you know, the, the stuff didn't go beyond that. But that's the only data set. I mean we're out look at things in a much larger area and then I don't know about other efforts.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Okay, well, Dr. Ivano Aiello, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:31:52] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: My third guest is Dr. Megan Teeley Strong, professor of Environmental sociology at San Jose State.
Professor Megan Teeley Strong, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:32:07] Speaker E: Thank you. Good to be here.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: So why don't we start by having you tell us what you study as an environmental sociologist.
[00:32:19] Speaker E: Yeah. So my work looks at how we can come to terms with the reality of the climate destabilization we are undergoing as a society.
And I segued. I was holding dialogues about anti racist work and then I realized that there was also a need for dialogues on this emerging climate crisis and that that conversation also has tenets of anti racism because of how central environmental racism is to the way in which this climate destabilization is occurring.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: When, when you say that, do you mean that the, the production of carbon dioxide of fossil fuels is taking place in areas that are, that subject minority communities to, you know, outsized risks? Or is this a sort of more broadly, you know, understood that the climate impacts will, will affect poor and minority groups more.
[00:33:26] Speaker E: So it's all of these things. So I like to think about the commodity chain like the systems of production from extraction all the way to like after we've used the products, what happens to it? And so when you look at the chain of all these commodities, it happens throughout the chain like who's extracting the material when material is extracted, what communities Are that impacting all the way to who gets the products, who gets to benefit from them, who is not? And then once the products are done, where does the pollution go? And then it's kind of all of those things together and happening at once. Because as a system we're having a very polluted way of life. And those burdens of that pollution tend to fall on communities that have less economic resources and also on communities of color. So it's not just where sites of production are located, where extraction sites are, but it's also where the pollution goes and it's the air, the water, the land, the food.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: A few weeks after the fire, you published an op ed in, in the San Francisco Chronicle and you reported that you lived 16 miles from the plant. And I was wondering, were you down where, where? And were you downwind of the smoke plume?
[00:34:42] Speaker E: Yeah, so I wasn't downwind from the smoke plume. And you know, I live in Live Oak, so it's an area that, you know, if I was going to go to Moss Landing, that could take up to 45 minutes. So, you know, if we go to the beach, we can see the, the towers from the plant. But other than that, it's not really on our radar. And I wouldn't have known how close I was to it except for once the fire happened and the community was kind of exploring and thinking about what's happening. I looked it up and so if you cut straight through the ocean, it's 16 miles as the crow flies.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Right.
Had you been aware of, of the plant or what was at it before the fire?
[00:35:27] Speaker E: You know, I have, I have a friend that lives very close down there. And so I was aware that there was a structure there. You know, I've driven past it on the Dolan Road many times, but I hadn't, I did not know that there was the biggest or one of the biggest lithium ion battery storage facilities that it was active. I actually didn't know the plant. I couldn't have told someone probably that it was active before this happened.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: You know, the utilization of the plant for batteries of course follows its earlier operation as first coal fired and then gas fired power plant. Right. So I'm wondering whether you know, of any kind of, you know, community information or consideration of what was happening there, you know, when the, when the batteries were being installed. I mean, have you done any looking into, into the backstory?
[00:36:18] Speaker E: I don't know the backstory. I know now there is a campaign to stop lithium battery facilities in Santa Cruz county that's being organized. I Don't know if there was any such or similar campaign or community information before what's currently was happening began. I don't know.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: I don't recall anything either. But that doesn't mean, you know, there weren't licensing procedures. But in any case, it wasn't. It wasn't very well known. What did you. Why don't you tell our listeners, you know, what the gist of your op ed was about?
[00:36:55] Speaker E: Yeah, you know, I have this research involving environmental sociology, but then I also, I got invested really, when I started teaching a class on environmental sociology. And this was maybe 10 or so years ago at UC Merced. And it was a class where students reached out to me and gave me things they were interested in and emails and comments more than they ever had. And so that kind of piqued my interest in it more just because the students were so motivated by the content. And that's what really began my exploration into this field. And then it's one of those things that, you know, if I'm teaching it, it's really hard to get it out of my brain. So it becomes kind of the way I about the world. And so, of course, when I hear there's this huge fire, I start thinking about the impacts to the environment and to the people around it. And I woke up that day and I found out about it. I don't remember how at this point, but I remember thinking, you know, my kid goes to a school where she has a lot of exposure to outside. And I was just, do I, you know, do I send my kid to school? And there was an email thread with some parents and the school. And, you know, some parents were very much like, you gotta be on this. And then the administrators, they were using air quality readers. And this is something that relates to that uncertainty, right? When talks, when there is potential toxicities, we're uncertain about them. So then the teachers are saying, the air quality looks good. But then some of the parents are like, okay, but does it measure this stuff? And we're like, we don't know. And then, you know, there was the spectrum, right? So I had some people that were out. Oh, yeah, I found out about it the night before. I remember I went to bed knowing about it, right? And some people were out, and then other people were staying in. And I had friends that left the area, right? They're. As soon as they got word of this, they're like, we're gone. We're out of here. We're not taking the risk. And then other people that, you know, were Downtown Santa Cruz. Great. So that was part of what was ongoing in my head, was thinking about how there is, there's. There aren't necessarily threads of communication that are when these things happened. So you end up finding about it maybe because you're online or someone else was online, but I don't remember an alert on my phone. I could be wrong. Eventually there was. I think you don't. And then you just. And then you're just. You don't know. Right. And then even since then, we have seen some authorities say one thing, right, that it's totally safe. And then others say, well, there could be some harm in the soil. And so we also don't know who is the real authority authority here. Right. Who really knows. So there's just all sorts of confusion about what, what is the risk and who knows who's able to judge that? Who's the best expert here, who's on the side, perhaps more of the corporation, who's on the side of the residents. So that, that's what was on my mind.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: I. I don't imagine that the air quality measurements included things like heavy metals. That is probably pollution. I mean, air pollution, you know, whatever, whatever dust and stuff like that. I'm not quite sure how to articulate this. So you know, who lives around the plant? I mean, what's. It seems to me that it's probably likely demography. The demography of the area has changed since the power plant opened in 1950, and that there was a lot more agriculture at one time. But who, who lives, you know, adjacent to the plant at this point?
[00:40:30] Speaker E: My understanding is that the, in terms of the plume and the downwind and where it took the kind of most dense part of these emissions and pollution was not even necessarily directly, closely, but more Prunedale. Moss Landing evidently is a very small town. And then you have the Elkhorn area around it, and then you have Prunedale and surrounding areas.
You know, I don't, I don't know again, Right. I don't know about the wind. I just know on that day where it seemed people were saying that it was settling and you know, that population in Prundale is, I think around, let's see, maybe 35, 40% white, 40 to 50% Hispanic. So there are more people of color in that area compared to Santa Cruz and the area up here.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Anything, I mean, is there anything else you can, you can tell us about that?
[00:41:31] Speaker E: I think in terms of. We can look at who is kind of making money from, who's benefiting from the battery Right. And there's shareholders and there's people that are making profit from these industries. So those are people who are going to benefit. I don't know if any of them live in the area. I also think as consumers, we have to think about our part in these industries. Right. These are new technologies that we all, I think, rely on for some of the stuff that we're doing. Having phones, et cetera, having a more online presence as a society. And I think that you have to think in terms of where did the plume go? Where did the most harm on that day and then any ensuing fires? Did it land on communities of people that didn't have resources? Yes. Did it land on communities of color? Yes. Did it land? Were there some single moms out there? Yes, probably. Were there elderly? Yes. Were the people that were disabled? Yes. Were there pregnant women? Were there children? Right. Those are the people that got the biggest. The people that got the biggest plumes that are in any type of situation, that's not ideal. Those are the people that are going to be most heavily impacted by that. And do I think that Vstra is going to kind of go door to door and check out what harm they might have caused with these emissions and pollutions in order to do the right thing? I haven't seen it yet. I've seen them offer the certificates or the.
Some sort of funding to people.
But my, I think what that was was that the residents in the areas where they were going to be able to get the stipend or the fund they had to go to or they had to send in. Right. The residents had to take those steps to get it. It wasn't Vstra going out and saying what harms have been caused. Right. Who feels like they have been harmed? And I think that gets us into kind of this double life of pollution in the sense that part of what happens in all these environmental disasters is that there is uncertainty all over the place, including what harm can be done, what harm has been done. Right. So we know that cancer rates, we've got cancer right where we have it in the United States, but it's unclear what specifically might cause that. Right. So we know that smoking is correlated with cancer later on, et cetera. And we have this general idea that there's these toxins in our environment that lead to cancer. But when we try to nail down like I had this or I ingested this or I was exposed to this and it is because of this particular product or corporation, et cetera, and that's why I'm having these Health outcomes. That is difficult to do. And there's a way in which people can exploit that uncertainty. And going back to the double life of pollution is that as consumers, as residents in this world, we have to kind of filter that for us. So that double life of pollution is that not only do, you know, could we be breathing it in, people that got the brunt of that plume of emissions. Right. Are breathing this in, living in it. But then we also have to navigate, you know, how much is this, and we have to worry about it. I was farther away. I was more in the clear. But I had my windows closed all weekend and I. Why, why didn't I leave? Right. I study this stuff. The first moment I knew there was this unending plume for however many hours eventually end. But for a while it was going, why didn't I just go? But I didn't. Right. I was like, okay, well, we're all here, we'll all be in it together, right?
[00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:16] Speaker E: And then so, and so over here is not even, you know, shutting the windows and then moving forward. I think people, especially in the areas most impacted are. It's going to be on a lot of their minds, and it's. It's going to. It's an emotional toll that it's taking beyond just any physical harm that could have been caused.
[00:45:35] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: I just wanted to point out that part of the problem here has to do with the statistical analysis. Right. That when you have low levels of pollution or contamination, you also need to have large numbers of people so often in order to see any kind of effect. And there's no way to identify a single person as having been affected by whatever the insult is. And so uncertainty, Right. That's part of the uncertainty. And I mean, that's a pretty common sort of thing.
[00:46:08] Speaker E: And then the type of data you're talking about, that takes funding and time and time and resources.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:46:17] Speaker E: And that's, that is why we need a federal government with a strong Environmental Protection Agency going to invest in scientists in research and data collection so that we can protect ourselves against any harm that could come from some of the things that we're producing and that are, in part sustaining our livelihood, our lives and livelihoods.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Well, you know, there. There probably will be efforts to, to rebuild the battery plant at Moss Landing, what, whatever, you know, whatever the politics are. And you mentioned in the op ed the precautionary principle. And so I'm just wondering in our last few minutes if you could expand on what that is and how that might be applied in this Case.
[00:47:00] Speaker E: Yeah. So it's going back to this. How do we. Right now the onus, like, so if you're someone who has experienced environmental harm, the onus is on you as the resident, right. Or as the person to prove that. And that can be very difficult to do for some of the reasons we've outlined here. The precautionary principle, the idea is that you try to put the onus on the producers of the product to demonstrate that what they're putting out there for consumers to consume and for producers to produce is safe.
So before these big industries come in and produce a lot of things for to turn a profit, to give consumers, you know, allegedly what we want, that they have run this data, they have run these tests, they have run this out. So I think in terms of the lithium ion battery storage plants, right, These are relatively new and there have been some fires. You know, it's not just isolated to this incident. The precautionary principle would say that this the V straw. The people that are producing and making these battery storage plants, they need to have already come up with the plans to prevent harm. So how. You know, why. So this would now like looking backwards, you know, they should be looking at. And of course, I'm sure they are like, why was the fire? What is the harm? And I think what would be great and importantly is that having transparency and clear communication with the communities beforehand moving forward would be good. Right? So according, supposedly that group, the campaign that's trying to get the. The campaign to stop lithium battery facilities in Santa Cruz county, right. They're saying there's three proposed sites in Santa Cruz county, supposedly one behind Dominican Hospital, one next to Aptos High, and then one on Minto Road in Watsonville. And so it seems like this is an industry that's moving forward and if we're going to rely on this energy, we have to be able to have these battery storage plants somewhere.
So figuring out where these are going to be located and also having the citizens and people that are living around these areas aware of what potential harms could come from living close and what to do. Like a clear plan, right. So we were told to shut our windows. That was them. And turn off any sort of ventilation. Ventilation.
But I'm not convinced that ever got that. I know. I think there were people in the evacuation zones that didn't evacuate. So I think that transparency and communication of all this information and then running some of the data. So having the monitors, you know, having monitors so that we can. We know where to go and we trust that what we're trying to measure in terms of the pollution is measured so that we have an accurate reading of what we're dealing with would be part of that precautionary principle.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Professor Strong, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability now.
[00:50:19] Speaker E: Thank you so much. It was good to be here. The last one thing I'd like to add is that, you know, we're in this society that is driven by GDP and bottom line and it's unclear that we're going to be able to figure out how to be sustainable without looking at our part in consumerism. And how do we resolve that gap between the needs of us as humans and the needs of our nation? Thank you.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability NOW broadcast about the battery fire that broke out at Moss Landing in January 2025. My guests were Rick O'Connell, Executive Director of Grid Lab, Dr. Ivano Aiello, professor of Geological Oceanography at San Jose State's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and Dr. Megan Teeley Strong, professor of Environmental Sociology at San Jose State.
[00:51:13] Speaker F: I don't usually do this, but I'd like to make a few additional comments about the battery fire at Moss Landing. First, there's very limited data about the extent to which heavy metals from the fire were spread around the region. As Professor Aiello mentioned, never again Moss Landing conduct at a citizen science project asking residents to take swabs from outside their homes and send them to a lab for analysis. The results suggested that some heavy metals.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: May have been carried 30 or 40 miles from the fire.
[00:51:41] Speaker F: So far as it is possible to tell, no one is trying to study or measure the extent of contamination.
Second, the local authorities and the EPA have reported that there are no apparent risks from particulates hydrogen fluoride in the air as a result of the fire. What was not mentioned or discussed are depositions of roughly 2 million pounds of heavy metals from the burning batteries and what the effects of exposure to them might be, especially on agricultural lands. We do know that heavy metals are toxic to living things, but the long term impacts of low level exposure are fairly uncertain.
Third, there have been no official or corporate reports about the causes of the fire. Lithium batteries can ignite for any of several reasons, including short circuits, damage to the battery, lithium plating and exposure to a heat source. A lithium battery fire generates oxygen that keeps it burning and makes it very difficult to extinguish. Vistra and PGE are already facing a number of lawsuits due to the fire and do not want to release any information that might point to restrictions responsibility for the fire. Finally, in the blurb for this week's.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: Show, I have linked a number of.
[00:52:52] Speaker F: Documents relating to the fire. The fire is no longer front page or even back page news, so there's very little information about investigations into the fire or research into its impacts.
[00:53:04] Speaker B: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] SustainabilityNow and Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability Now.
[00:53:40] Speaker A: Times and run. Through currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine, Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
